Mic Wright is a journalist specialising in technology, music and popular culture. He lives in Dublin.

Prism: first they came for the online extremists

The “shock! horror!” response to the Prism revelations that the NSA is monitoring traffic through Google, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Yahoo and more has been quickly followed by shrugs and dismissals from many people. Why worry when the government isn’t ever going to be bothered about what you personally do? But what you do online, who you choose to email, what you choose to watch, what you read, listen to and comment on, doesn’t matter until the day it suddenly does. You can raise your eyebrows at wholesale surveillance efforts until it’s you that ends up wrongly flagged on a watch list or monitored closely because of your political beliefs or those of people you are acquainted with.

In projects of this kind individual liberty is, ironically, terrorised under the guise of protecting us from terror. It’s easy to conclude that you have nothing to hide without thinking deeply about what could be wrongly construed or deliberately misinterpreted as something you should be hiding. Even if you accept the premise that these huge databases are being built for entirely honourable reasons it is impossible to guarantee that the information contained within them will not be exploited by a government seeking to flush out those it considers "the enemy within".

Right-thinking people should find it chilling when Obama blithely ended his comments on the issue by saying: “… I know that the people who are involved in these programs …they’re professionals. In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a program run amok but when you actually look at the details, I think we’ve struck the right balance.” If he truly believes that – and I’m sure he doesn’t – I have a lovely bridge across the Thames to sell him.

I’ll now immediately fall foul of Godwin’s Law – “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches” – but history offers too important a lesson not to make that connection. The punch-card powered computerised census of Germany enabled by IBM in 1933 and subsequent efforts thereafter made it far easier for the Nazi regime to identify Jews, Gypsies and others it deemed undesirable.

Pastor Niemoller’s “First they came…” poem is over-quoted but with good reason. It is far too easy to be complacent. Addicted and reliant as many of us are on free web services, it’s more convenient to just accept the companies outright denials that they have been complicit with the NSA’s programme. But look closely at those statements and things become rather less clear, as Michael Arrington pointed out.

The tech industry’s denials have been carefully drafted and similarly worded. It is not unfeasible to imagine that those companies have turned over users' personal information to the NSA in another fashion. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement was one of the strongest: “Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information…”

Zuckerberg’s words are reassuring until you consider that any company that receives an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act – the legislation the Obama administration is using to justify the broad surveillance – is forbidden from disclosing they have received it or disclosing any information about it. It’s not surprising that no mea culpas have emerged from major tech firms or that Palantir – the big data surveillance company with the $5 billion valuation and CIA funding – denies any connection with the project. The NSA has been a Palantir client and one of the company’s co-founders, billionaire investor Peter Thiel, also sits on Facebook’s board.

The digital evangelists of Silicon Valley have spent years trying to sell us on the idea that privacy is a dead concept. Despite the primary coloured image of Google and the techno-hippy posturing about openness favoured by Facebook, there are much harder-edged instincts at work in these corporations. To believe they will stand up against the intelligence agencies is naive in the extreme. First they came for the online extremists but I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t an online extremist. Well, not until an analyst somewhere put all that data into context.